If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?

We’re happier when the assholes are villains.

Death is almost never timely, even for the old.

Art is long and life is short.

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

Penicillin was as liberating for gay sex as the pill had been for straight sex.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life”. And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

Dutton, the home of Winnie the Pooh, would find a second identity as a home for gay fiction.

Didn’t he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?

Allen Ginsberg startled the audience at OutWrite, the gay literary conference, when he confessed he didn’t worry about AIDS since his sex life consisted chiefly of giving blowjobs to straight college boys.

An obsessed reader figured that ‘Armistead Maupin’ was an anagram for ‘is a man I dreamt up’.

Gay liberation did not create gay promiscuity. There was sex before there were marches, politics, or books – it was the best reason for being homosexual, it and love.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

A work of art doesn’t need to provide complete answers in order to succeed. It needs only to excite us into asking questions and give us a place to think about them while we become involved in other people’s lives.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

A disproportionate number of stories are love stories – and what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?

A writer who can’t use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual.

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

It has been a marvellous age of invention: radio, aeroplane, electric light, the telephone, and fellatio.

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts.

A career in the arts can make anyone crazy.

If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.